I installed sef but ended up receiving an error 404 on every link other than the home page. urghh.
I searched forum and found related issue but no fix that I could understand (newbie) and as I have to launch the site in a few days I decided to just uninstall sef. Problem now is I am still getting the 404 error.

Would really appreciate any feedback

Hello,

the problem might be in the .htaccess file. You should check it. Either in case you have SEF still installed or not. Or just delete it, but them set even Joomla SEO functionality to be disabled.

Getting 404 is very common problem and has been answered many times here, as well as it is described in FAQs and documentation.

thanks for that but I am just having trouble understanding faqs. It says:

For apache, set your \".htaccess\" file like this:
##
# @version $Id: htaccess.txt 2368 2006-02-14 17:40:02Z stingrey $
# @package Joomla
# @copyright Copyright (C) 2005 Open Source Matters. All rights reserved.
# @license www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html GNU/GPL
# Joomla! is Free Software
##
#####################################################
# READ THIS COMPLETELY IF YOU CHOOSE TO USE THIS FILE
#
# The line just below this section: 'Options FollowSymLinks' may

and on and on, surely I don't put all this copy into my .htaccess file? Thers is a section further down:

#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/component/option,com) [NC,OR] ##optional - see notes##
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (/|\.htm|\.php|\.html|/[^.]*)$ [NC]
#RewriteRule ^(content/|component/) index.php

Is this the section I put into the .htaccess?

Currently my .htaccess file has the following in it:

[color=#FF0000]#-FrontPage-

IndexIgnore .htaccess */.??* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*


order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all


order deny,allow
deny from all

AuthName site.com
AuthUserFile /home/wwwsite/public_html/_vti_pvt/service.pwd
AuthGroupFile /home/wwwsite/public_html/_vti_pvt/service.grp
php_value upload_max_filesize 10M[/color]

ok i just read again, found the htaccess.txt. I think I get it now. My question though is do I copy what I have in my existing HT accross to new one?

It depends... I would not do it if you do not know what you are doing or what you want to do.

For example, I do not get why you have there in .htaccess:

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all

order deny,allow
deny from all

Why do you have it twice there?

btw. order deny,allow
deny from all

directive will deny access from all hosts except the one explicitly allowed by allow directive;
so maybe the problem is there...

If you ar not sure how to set .htaccess and what rules need to be there and which do not, the best would be to talk to your webserver administrator.

Or hire us to do it :-), we can configure it for you, Just, please, do not expect us to explain Apache's documentation on these forums.